Publication Date:
2023-06-13
Description:
Changes in the global ocean circulation produce, via motional induction, time-varying geomagnetic signals. On long length and time scales these signals are hidden beneath larger core-generated signals but, due to their location at Earth’s surface, on sufficiently short length scales and considering month to interannual timescales they may be detectable in measurements made by low-Earth-orbit magnetic survey satellites such as the Swarm mission. Such signals would provide a new source of information related to ocean circulation and conductivity variations. Here, we investigate this question using forward simulations of the magnetic signals generated by (i) the oceans, using the ECCO v4r4 ocean circulation model and a realistic electrical conductivity model for the Earth (Velimsky et al., 2021), and (ii) the core dynamo, using an advanced numerical geodynamo model (Aubert et al., 2017) that in its latest version correctly simulates the relevant timescales of core processes (waves, advection etc.). We use these to generate synthetic satellite observations based on real orbits from the Swarm mission, and simulated orbits of the proposed NanoMagSat mission. We find it is possible to recover ocean-generated secular variation (SV) and secular acceleration (SA) signals from 6 months of low-earth-orbit satellite data in these synthetic tests. It is expected that there will be significant benefits from using data from the NanoMagSat mission when considering shorter periods and an ionospheric field is present; further work is needed in this direction.
Language:
English
Type:
info:eu-repo/semantics/conferenceObject
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